Results by title

2 books match the query 'Simpson, Michael'

cover of Gods and Heroes of the Greeks: The "Library" of Apollodorus

Gods and Heroes of the Greeks

The "Library" of Apollodorus

Michael Simpson

University of Massachusetts Press, 1976

The immortal characters of Greek mythology enact their dramas, conflicts, and passions in the Library of Apollodorus. Probably composed in the first century A.D., it is the only Greek handbook of mythology to survive antiquity, and is a major source of our knowledge of Greek myths. 

Beginning with the birth of the gods and ending with the death of Odysseus, the Library traces the destinies of such great mythic figures as Prometheus, Oedipus, Heracles, Daedalus, and the heroes of the Trojan War. Sir James G. Frazer called the Library “an accurate record of what the Greeks in general believed about the origin an early history of the world and their race.” 

Michael Simpson’s new translation captures the fine simplicity and straightforwardness of the original. Leonard Baskin’s drawings throw a unique contemporary light on this ancient world. 

[more]
cover of Terminal City: Infrastructures of Racial Colonial Capitalism in Vancouver

Terminal City

Infrastructures of Racial Colonial Capitalism in Vancouver

Michael Simpson

University of Minnesota Press, 2026

The entanglement of Vancouver’s infrastructure in settler colonialism and racialized exploitation

Vancouver, Canada, has long been held up as an environmentally conscious coastal refuge and model of progressive urban planning. Unpacking the troubling complexities that lie beneath the city’s otherwise tidy self-image, Terminal City reveals the long, recurring patterns of racialized violence and Indigenous dispossession crucial to its formation.

Examining the histories of Vancouver’s infrastructures, including railways, ports, the freeway system, fossil-fuel pipelines, and property, Michael Simpson details the various spatial manifestations of settler colonialism and racial capitalism that constitute the city’s urban environment—using it as a case study to reveal such tendencies around the world. Simpson exposes how the seizure of Indigenous lands and the destruction of Black communities has been foundational to the development of the city, and he highlights its structural dependency on these violent legacies, as well as the ongoing struggles to dismantle them.

Bringing together theoretical insights from the fields of urban geography, political ecology, and Indigenous studies, Simpson provides a distinctive intervention into contemporary debates around the material basis of logistics and circulation. At a time when massive upheavals to urban infrastructure are taking place in the hopes of establishing greater sustainability, Terminal City raises important questions about how this moment of transition might be harnessed to bring about decolonial abolitionist futures that redefine what a city can become.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

[more]